Mangroves provide a wide array of ecosystem services and among them carbon sequestration is widely acknowledged. A recent Nature Geoscience article explores the Global distribution of mangrove canopy height.Mangrove forests burst with life, thriving in the muddy and saline environment of tropical coasts. While they cover a small portion of land area (geographically), they are giants in Earth’s carbon cycle. Mangroves are among the planet’s best carbon scrubbers, moving far more than their fair share of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into long-term storage.Thriving in brackish water that kills other plants, mangroves drop tons of leaves and branches—more than 9 metric tons per hectare (4 tons per acre) per year. The litter decomposes very slowly because the forests flood regularly at high tide. This translates into a lot of carbon taken out of the atmosphere and stored as peat in mangrove soils.
New satellite-based maps of mangrove heights
